The Old Man and The Sea

I have a Feminism and Women's Writing paper on Monday, the 16th, but can't seem to get down to studying. Instead, I've been reading. Reading books that have nothing to do with my exam coming up. Typical. Last night I finished Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Today I'm reading The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Both the books have been pretty good. The first book by Marquez I read was Love in the time of Cholera, an absolutely delightful, charming book, full of magical realism. It's full of passages of intense love and feeling which in the hands of any other writer would have boring, unbelievable and just plain tiresome. But Marquez creates characters who have strange, unbelievable eccentricities which contrary to expectation make them all the more real. He creates parallel worlds and lives effortlessly.His style of writing is really simple, but the simplicity forces us to conjure images and ideas in our heads about the exact meaning of his words. However, this post is not a book report on Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

As I was saying, I'm currently reading Hemingway. I actually wanted to read A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls earlier, but I found the book at an exhibition for 10 bucks and couldn't resist buying it. (Actually, come to think of it, I have of late been coming across a really large number of cheap books that I've wanted for a long time all over Mumbai. My last purchase was 4 or 5 MAD Magazines I picked up dirt cheap while I was walking from the V.T. McDonald's to Fort).

So, coming back to the point. The book. It's good. I had a million reservations about reading it. I've heard really bad reviews about it. It just drags on and on...It's never ending, yaar. It just has no plot...no story...how the hell can anyone read 109 pages about an old man trying to fish? But it's not really as bad as that. It does have no plot, but that's because the author didn't intend it to. Sample this excerpt:

Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never had I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and knows that this is how he should make his fight. He can not know that it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what he will bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?

Similarly,

I wonder why he jumped, the old man thought. He jumped almost as though to show me how big he was. I know now, anyway, he thought. I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand.Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence.

It's been three days now since the old man has hooked the fish and is being pulled by it into the sea. I still don't know if he finally manages to kill the fish, and he if does kill the fish, if he manages to return home. I can't wait to find out.

The book seems highly allegorical, like in the passages above. I wonder what the sea and the fish and the old man are motifs of? i guess I'll think about these more deeply once I finish reading the book.